SATELLITE MEETINGS

The Herpetology Satellite Symposium at ICN 2020 will focus on the “Neural Systems and Behavior of Amphibians and Reptiles.” The aim of the symposium is to provide opportunities for students, postdocs, and junior faculty to receive focused commentary on their latest research and to establish international collaborative relationships with experts on the neural basis of behavior in these diverse animals. This satellite will emphasize the unique and universal aspects of amphibian and reptile neurobiology, including motor pattern generation, predator-prey interactions, acoustic communication, behavior, physiology, ecology and conservation. Building on the first Herpetology Satellite Symposium at ICN 2018 in Brisbane, and amphibian satellite workshops at earlier meetings, this second herpetology satellite will allow the examination of synergistic themes in neural systems and behavior in amphibians and reptiles.

Research on the reception and production of electric signals in fish has provided findings of general significance for neurobiology at many successive levels of organization: from synaptic, cellular and circuital levels to systems and pathways underlying behavior. In doing so, this research has contributed to our understanding of neural mechanisms, neuroethology, evolution and other fields of knowledge. This will be the ninth meeting aiming to gather the whole community working on electroreception and electrogeneration. It is preceded by pioneer meetings in Gif sur Yvette in 1978 and 1985 and as a satellite of the ICN meeting at Montreal (1992), San Diego (1998), Bonn (2001), Vancouver (2007), Maryland (2012), Montevideo (2016), and Brisbane (2018).  The goal of the meeting will be to show how present studies on electrosensory – electromotor systems contribute to the general progress of neuroscience, neuroethology, genomics, development and evolution. Following tradition, speakers will be asked to focus on recent experimental findings or theoretical constructs of general interest. Students will be encouraged to present their research in poster sessions.  The expected contributions may cover research areas beyond electrosensory and electromotor systems, for example: animal communication, cognition, navigation, neuroendocrinology, development and evolution of the nervous system of electroreceptive animals, as well as related topics from other disciplines, as imaging or robotics.

Teleost fish are a species-rich vertebrate group that has conquered diverse ecological niches on six of the seven continents. The founders of ethology, prominently among them Karl von Frisch, Erich von Holst and Niklas Tinbergen, already noted the behavioral diversity and striking cognitive abilities of teleosts. Indeed, there is lots to study, from the ability of the archerfish to shoot down airborne prey with a water jet to the complex social systems of cichlids from the great East African lakes. More recently, the cyprinid zebrafish (Danio rerio) has risen to the ranks of a premier model system in biomedical research, largely owing to the optical accessibility of its larval stage. Detailed brain atlases that link structure to function are now available, as are high-resolution computational maps of kinematic motifs and an ever-expanding library of transgenic lines and mutants. While these advances have revealed basic principles of vertebrate neural circuit development and function, the mechanistic insights gleaned from zebrafish studies do not transfer easily to the questions asked by researchers interested in teleosts with different lifestyles or more sophisticated behavioral repertoires. This satellite symposium aims to prepare the ground for cross-fertilization between the different communities, bringing together speakers with zebrafish neuroscience background and experts working on the neuroethology of other fish species, including archerfish, bettas, cichlids and sticklebacks.

New and emerging techniques for visualizing neural structures and behavior are revolutionizing neuroethology. These include new developments in volume electron microscopy, microCT, and light microscopy. There are also new techniques for tissue clearing and delivery of fluorescent probes. Recording activity deep in neural tissue has also undergone advances, allowing us to record and control activity in large numbers of neurons. Important challenges remain regarding how to integrate information obtained using these various techniques and how to store and share it. This satellite meeting is to bring together experts in the field and people who might be interested in applying these techniques to their research on the neural basis of behavior.

Lepidopterans show an astonishingly large repertoire of different behaviors and abilities that range from learning of colors and odors, to the multimodal control of their flight, to long-distance migration across entire continents. These different tasks pose diverse challenges for their neural systems. It is therefore not surprising that lepidopterans serve as model animals for a growing number of Neuroethology research groups around the world to answer a wide range of questions across many different disciplines, including neurobiology, evolution, ecology, and biomechanics.  Because of this variety of disciplines and questions, researchers working on lepidopteran models rarely meet across their specific questions of interest (migration, flight control, olfaction, vision, etc). However, exchange across specialties could catalyze research on these promising model systems, especially through the exchange of collected knowledge on their general biology, transfer of methodologies, and inspiration of new collaborations. We therefore propose a satellite meeting to bring together researchers studying moths and butterflies across this range of behaviors with the goal of establishing synergies between groups working. The comparative perspective will help to understand general principles in lepidoperan behaviour, neuroscience and biomechanics, as well as review and discuss state-of-the-art-techniques to access both the physiology and genetics of these animals such as CRISPR, quantitative behaviour, and tetrode recordings. The aim of the satellite meeting is to advance the field of lepidopteran neuroethology, highlight the power of lepidopterans as a model species and to give participants the unique opportunity to gain new insights into the study of lepidopterans across the boundaries of their specialties.